Scions of the Times

November 1995
Premiere Magazine
by Cyndi Stivers

To put a '90's spin on Billy Wilder's classic romance 'Sabrina,' masters of the Hollywood universe Harrison Ford, Sydney Pollack, and Scott Rudin wish upon two rising stars.

Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond are lounging around a campfire, enjoying a romantic meal of steamed clams amid the dunes of Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard. A fog is rolling in beneath the starry sky, braiding itself among the tall reeds. Ford takes a leisurely draft of white wine, then removes his shoes and socks, rolls up his pants, and dances a little jig. Ormond laughs, a lustier sound than one might expect from the look of her. As it happens, the twinkling stars are just pin lights peeking through a blue-black velvet scrim. The fog billows from a smoke machine; the wine is grape juice. The clams were bought at the Fulton Fish Market in downtown Manhattan at 4 A.M. And the beach is a soundstage in Astoria, Queens-a bad-weather cover set for Sabrina, Sydney Pollack’s update of the 1954 Billy Wilder classic about a chauffeurs daughter who beguiles the lords of the manor. . Though the set has its light moments (often instigated by Ford), the atmosphere is all business. And the pressure is on. In order to permit a more sensible shooting-and-editing timetable, the $50 million-plus film has shifted from a summer bow to a December release-which also means it’s straining its schedule and budget. Meanwhile, Pollack never lets himself forget that this is a remake of a sentimental favorite that starred Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden. Ormond-who, fairly or not, will be compared with Hepburn-made a solid Hollywood debut in Legends of the Fall and First Knight but is not yet a cinch at the box office (though Ford usually fills that bill). Still, Paramount can’t be too far off on the likely appeal of the project: There were echoes of Hepburn’s Sabrina wardrobe, sparked by the remake, all over Seventh Avenue runways last season.

The scene to be filmed over the next six hours-a lot of dialogue, shot from various angles and distances-will not be familiar to fans of the original: Sabrina teases wealthy tycoon Linus Larrabee (Ford) about his reputa­tion for being cold and work-obsessed (“the world’s only living heart donor”), as Linus warms up to her in spite of himself. Ormond, elegant even when sitting cross-legged in the sand, seems intent upon the task at hand as Ford banters with the crew.

“Okay, let’s shoot one of these,” says Pollack. After a few takes, there’s some tinkering with the flaming torches, and the director hunkers down around the campfire to confer with his actors. They play around with pacing and phrasing until Ford blows a line. “Ahh, sorry,” he says. Ormond giggles, unperturbed. “I’d like to try a whole new tack on it,” Ford suddenly announces. “Then let’s do it,” Ormond says gamely. “Doing what?” “I don’t know,” he says, frowning. “I don’t know-I just don’t like it yet. It seems too broad, too played. A lot of it we can fix in close-up, but Somehow, Ford’s agonizing seems droll and entertaining, which may have something to do with why his movies have grossed more than $2 billion at the box office. Pollack, himself a world-class worrier but a master at making actors feel comfortable, swoops in to reassure them. “We just haven’t found the right color yet,” he says. As he suggests refinements, they walk off to watch play­back on the monitor. When Ormond buries her face in her hands, Ford grabs her shoulders and shakes her, teasing, “Look at it!” “Can I try once more?” asks Pollack, forming a huddle back on the set. “I’m driv­ing you crazy.” “No, you’re not,” Ford replies heartily. “So remind me again....”

Subsequent takes give Pollack what he’s looking for. But Ford is still unsure. “I got terribly shmutzed up at the beginning,” he mutters. Let’s go again. Let’s go again, please! I want to take a new attack.” “No, no new attack,” soothes Pollack. “You’ve got it now!” The next time, all goes well-except for a strange, muffled sound in the background during the scene. “Were you giggling during the take?” Ford asks Pollack, trying to sound stem. “It’s those fucking earphones,” Pollack replies sheepishly. “I can’t hear myself.” “I thought I heard giggling,” Ormond adds, mock horrified. “I find it very reassuring,” Ford declares. “We’ll cover it with fish sounds.”

THE LATTER-DAY Sabrina started to take shape about three years ago from a script developed by producer Scott Rudin and screenwriter Barbara Benedek. “It was sort of a similar triangle,” Rudin recalls, “and I said, ‘It should be like Sabri no.’ So Barbara went and watched it and said, ‘Why don’t we just do Sabrina?’ “ After winning the blessing of Paramount Pictures chairman Sherry Lansing (the studio, home of Rudin’s production company, also released the original), Benedek got to work. The first script was a kind of “Sabrina lite,” according to Rudin. “It didn’t have the depth that the script has now, but it had great jokes and it was charming. I sent it to Harrison, and to­gether we got Sydney to do it.” Recruiting Pollack wasn’t easy. “It took awhile to talk him into it,” says Ford. “I don’t think he was sure until he could find a way of telling the story that interested him.”

Pollack’s reluctance was partly his usual process; as a veteran producer-director, he al­ways suffers torments about his affinity for the material before he commits, and the hand- wringing usually pays off (see They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, Out of Africa, The Firm; Out of Africa won him Os­cars for Best Director and Best Picture in 1985). But there was a unique issue in this case. “I didn’t want to do a remake of Billy Wilder,” Pollack admits. “People are very un­forgiving about remakes, particularly of some­thing like Sabrina. So many people were so charmed by it. I said no two or three times. Pollack also called Wilder and says he found him “justifiably annoyed” that the stu­dio hadn’t consulted him, though Wilder had no beef with Pollack himself. (Wilder de­clined to comment for this story.)
“And then I talked to Harrison,” Pollack recalls. “What really changed my mind was thinking seriously about working with him I’m a big fan of his, particularly in love stories, which he doesn’t get to do very much. So then I thought, Well, what the hell, let’s do it”

Though ardent Sabrina buffs treasure the film’s fairy-tale quality, Pollack decided he had to make his own version more down to- earth, since today’s average moviegoer is more literal-minded. “I didn’t think you could get away with going quite so far from reality,” he says. “You could just assert things then; today,] people want to see them happen.” (Yes why did Sabrina swoon for Linus after one quick cruise around the bay? And, while we re at it, was it supposed to be charming when she tried to asphyxiate herself in the garage?) The resulting screenplay, by Benedek and frequent Pollack collaborator David Rayfiel is studded with contemporary details Linus talks of fiber optics and electronics rather thaft of sugarcane and plastics-and the emotional on display have clearer motivations. The fe­male characters are much more multidimen­sional and accomplished than their ‘Sos counterparts; instead of going off to the Cordon Bleu cooking school so she can become a kitchen servant like her mother, Sabrina works as an assistant at French Vogue and then becomes a photographer.

But the ripest role for the writers was Linus, who has become the archetypal corpo­rate shark. “Sydney knows all these guys,” says Rudin. “His friends are Mike Qvitz and Herb Allen and Edgar Bronfman. And I said to him early on that the model for Linus, to me, was Barry Diller, whom I worked for at Fox and whose ferociousness in his work was electrifying to be around. So what would hap­pen to that kind of guy if the thing that he thinks is the worst that could possibly happen saves his life? And Sydney liked that; that was the way he made ita personal story for him.” And what of Sabrina? As Rudin remembers it, “Sydney felt it would be better not to have a big star, because of the whole Audrey Hepburn thing. I think he felt he’d have a better chance of being judged freshly without-the baggage of a name.”

The three finalists for Sabrina were French actress Juliette Binoche, British ballerina Darcey Bussell, and Ormond, who would not have been able to audition if an ear infection hadn’t put her in a London hospital (away from the First Knight set in Wales). By the fall of 1994, with the production start looming, Pollack chose Ormond. ‘There was a time, when people started to see Legends of the Fall, that 30 people were saying ‘Julia Ormond’ all at once,” Rudin recalls. Pollack’s only stipulation was that she had to be willing to chop off her glorious Pre-Raphaelite mane-which is now coiled on a chest at her London home. “She was completely up for it,” Rudin reports. “I think she recognized that the trap for her was a lifetime of Helena I Bonham Carter parts.

Though Ormond welcomed the trim, she notes that “it did strange things in terms of sexuality. I don’t feel I’m a particularly feminine person naturally, and I think my hair did an awful lot for me. I suddenly felt that some­thing really quite major had been taken away. But at least I’m not relying on a prop!” She pauses a moment, then deadpans:
“And now I’ll probably grow it again. As it turned out, the most unlikely casting for this production was not of the title role but of the William Holden part: David Larrabee, the devilishly handsome, hopelessly irrespon­sible younger brother, the kind of guy who thinks leveraged buyout means shopping for high heels. While looking at various wild­card possibilities (including John F. Kennedy, Jr.), Pollack hit upon Greg Kinnear, host of NBC’s wee-hours talk show Later and previously writer-anchor of the cheeky Talk Soup on cable’s E! Entertainment Television. When Rudin called Fred Westheimer at the William Morris Agency to set up a meeting with Kinnear, Westheimer said he might not be available. Rudin, as usual, was not eas­ily dissuaded: “I said, ‘Look, he’s never going to get the part, so just tell him to come in.

Although Kinnear did start out as a drama major at the University of Arizona, his only prior film experience had been reporting on movie openings for E! and its predecessor, Movietime. “I covered the premiere of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, which you may or may not remember,” he says wryly. “So I showed up to this meeting at Paramount- Paramount Studios-it’s so cool! I did a little hyperventilating and went in and met Sydney.” Pollack told him about the part and read a few scenes with him. As Kinnear remembers it, “He said, ‘Look, it’s a long shot, okay? I’m not going to lie to you.’” Kinnear chuckles as if he still can’t believe his luck. ‘That’s all I wanted to hear.” After two taped auditions, Kinnear went on with Later-and didn’t hear anything for three and a half months. “At first he was sort of a mild contender” Rudin recalls. ‘Then, the more Sydney worked with him, the more he really liked him.” Kinnear got the word about the Sabrina role three days before last Christmas, during the countdown for a Later taping with John Larroquette. He has absolutely no recollection of what he said to Larroquette after that.

SO HE’S GOTTEN the part, and Kinnear now has to figure out how he’s going to survive acting in a major motion picture-Opposite Indiana Jones, no less. The first time he meets the cast and crew is during wardrobe tests in mid-January. Ford is already under the lights in his tuxedo, impeccable and un­flappable, and Kinnear is told to stand next to him. “I am just a little dazed and confused,” Kinnear recalls. “I’m a little nervous, and I’m chewing a little gum.” In an attempt to make conversation, he offers Ford some gum but Ford declines. Kinnear asks, “It’s okay isn t it? It’s all right to chew gum?” Ford reassures him. Finally, the camera is ready, a hundred voices hush, and all eyes are on the actors as Pollack calls for the camera to roll film. It’s still quiet from the first take when Ford suddenly wheels on Kinnear in disgust. “Are you chewing gum?” he roars. “Sydney, I can’t work with this guy!” “It was so cruel!” Ormond says, laughing. “But it did kick off a relationship for the two of them. I think if he’d done that to me, I’d have probably had an apoplectic fit and left.” Kinnear stayed, and the next time they worked together, Ford took him to lunch. “Yeah, he’s quite the jokester,” says Kinnear. “He’s always had a pretty good time at my expense, I don’t mind telling you.”

Ford demurs when asked about the story. “I vaguely remember that,” he says. ‘Well, I remember it slightly differently, I think. Oh, it doesn’t matter. His version’s good. He’s the comedian. He’s going to be terrific in this movie. I never saw anybody who has never done a film before come in cold that way, catch on so quickly, and do such a good job.” Then he adds, smirking darkly, “Hell still have his shot at me when I do his show.” Now back in that wardrobe-tested tuxedo, Ford is sitting in his director’s chair at the edge of the set, waiting calmly for the next shot. “I’ve been looking for a comedy for a long time,” he says, “one with some ambition and I thought this had it. I responded emotionally to the character, the dilemma, the circumstances I also thought it would be the kind of movie that an audience would love to see.” Pollack was a logical choice for this kind of grown-up love story, but Ford particularly wanted a strong director with a formidable production history, so that all he had to do was show up and act. “I wanted to be directed,” Ford declares, “because I’d had my fill of doing it the other way. I’m usually involved in story conferences and production details, and I just didn’t want that this time. If we end up with a good movie, that’s all I care about.” Ormond. by contrast, found plenty to worry about during preproduction. Besides extensive preparations with costume designers Ann Roth and Gary Jones, Ormond studied photography, read books that Sabrina would have read in American schools, watched tapes of My So-called Life (provided by her Legends director. Ed Zwick), and met with girls at a New York Catholic school, hoping to give Sabrina the naive hopefulness of youth. She practiced “walking in high heels, something I find you need to practice.” And like the other actors, she took another look at the original movie-”and then I stopped, because you kind of have to make it your own.

Once production began, it was precisely that challenge that spooked her. “It was very tense at first; I wasn’t relaxed on set,” she allows. “It took me a while to come out of my shell with the crew, and it took me a long time to realize that a lot of it was the pressure of it being a remake” She laughs about it now. “You realize that there is a subliminal pressure of knowing that this person created this part brilliantly-despite the fact that none of us are wanting to step in the shoes of the people who did it in the initial version. You feel like you’re lacking in qualities that they had that were wonderful. So, yeah.., it was tense. The production schedule allowed Pollack only nine weeks to cut the film, two weeks less than he’d had on The Firm (also produced with Rudin). He decided that he had to make a pitch for more time-to allow for more preproduction planning on the location work in Paris and as insurance against the va­garies of weather. The only solution was to delay the release from summer to Christmas-and, not surprisingly, Paramount balked at first. But he was determined to avoid what happened on The Firm, which, Rudin says, “barely made it into the theater with wet prints. We always said, ‘Oh God, if we could get another ten minutes out of it,’ but there was just no time.” Paramount eventually relented, and the production hit its stride in Paris. “Once we found a way of working that was good for all of us,” says Ormond, “it lightened up a lot. Certain crew members discovered that Harrison loves jokes, so Harrison would be laughing in one corner, and Sydney, who loves to focus and loves to concentrate, would get distracted by it, and then he’d want to know the joke.” She still felt a bit wobbly in comparison with Pollack and Ford, but it no longer unnerved her. “Harrison and Sydney are like two precision instruments,” Ormond offers, “like the things they love as individuals-their planes and all the technical stuff. It’s like working between two reference points that have a tension cord between, and they tighten and tighten and tighten and get it better and better, and I kind of run at this cord, somewhere in between!” She laughs at herself. “I’ve gotten to be really nutty about Julia,” says Rudin. “Her whole career’s changed while we were making the movie. I’ve seen a lot of people spin out under the kind of pressure that she’s been dealt. She’s weathered stuff that would send most people into rehab.”

ONE DETAIL THAT hasn’t changed from the original Sabrina is what Kinnear calls “the David Larrabee love ritual,” which consists of “one bottle of champagne, two champagne flutes in my back pockets-ever so gently covered, so as not to draw any unnecessary attention-and then slipping out the back gate over to the solarium to meet up with whatever lovely young lady will have me on that particular evening.” It’s Kinnear’s last night of filming at the Larrabee mansion loca­tion in Glen Cove, Long Island; the next day, it’s back to Later in Los Angeles-and not a moment too soon for NBC. (During breaks in his Sabrina schedule, he flew back and taped three or four shows a day.) “So, basically, in that scene I had to walk up and put two glasses in my back pockets,” he says amiably. “And I have to tell you, I’m exhausted. You’ll find that the DeNiros and Hoffmans of the world have to search for that inner energy in order to create their art, but for me it’s really an exhausting process.”

Camp Larrabee, as it’s nicknamed by the crew, is actually an estate called Salutation, completed in 1929 by Junius Spencer Mor­gan, a grandson of J. Pierpont. Found during a sweep of all mansions within a two-hour drive of New York City, this twenty-acre property was perfect for Sabrina, since it was right on Long Island Sound (off the same Dosoris Lane where the original story is set), unoccupied, and already under renovation. Besides interior work, the production has built a two-story wing onto the garage to serve as Sabrina’s childhood home, and on the other side of the house, the all-important outdoor ballroom, which looks on camera as if it’s been there for decades. The faux-flagstone dance floor is ringed with cabaret tables and curtained cabanas topped by alighting eagles There’s plenty of mock statuary-and a real Madonna and child raised to camera height on apple boxes. The wooden gazebo is paint­ed to look like verdigris, and there are flowers and fairy lights in profusion.

The only things obviously wrong with this picture are the towering Condor cranes that circle the site. Each holds a 10K light, and to­gether they draw so much juice that the pro duction has had to install its own mini power plant on the property. The lights also make the birds think it’s dawn, so they tweet all night long. But their chirping is nothing com pared with the bizarre call of the tree frogs ‘The editor called and said there was some one screaming in the dailies,” says Pollack chuckling. “I was joking about fires, floods pestilence-and then the frogs hit.” Before big dialogue scenes, the prop guys thump on the ground beneath the trees with two by fours, which quells the frogs temporarily.

It’s now the second-to-last night of filming, and Ford’s last. He’s ready to get on a plane home to Wyoming, but he still has a few more shots to do. Though the damp salt air is  thick with biting insects, they never touch him. Strolling around the set, Ford runs lines with Pollack, trying to improve on a joke. Then the director takes the floor to orchestrate the scene, which includes Ford, a woman re ferred to in the script as “Wonderbra and about 150 party guests, waiters, and band members. All listen as Pollack explains what he wants. Suddenly a large piece of scenery crashes to the ground, and the extras gasp Out of the crowd, Ford springs to the dance floor with his arms raised in a reassunng,  Nixonian gesture and a marvelously pompous  look on his face. “I’m all right!” he cries, and the extras guffaw, thrilled that he would bother to make a joke for their amusement.

One of the reasons he can relax and kid around is that he feels the movie is in good hands. Speaking of Pollack, he observes happily: “I don’t think I’ve ever had a better time with anybody. Sydney’s like an old wine he s been around for a while. Well made to start with, and aging well. He knows exactly what he wants to achieve, and that’s wonderful. Pollack, is probably the last of his generation of Hollywood directors who still gets his pick of A-list projects.

“He has a very specific signature to his work, and he’s one of the very few filmmakers who really works on a script,” says Paramount production president John Goldwyn. “He’s the only one of his generation who’s never lost touch, who makes pictures that transcend his peer group. And they really hold up.” His only commercial misstep in recent years was Havana in 1990, a failure that caught him off guard at the time. “In some ways-I wouldn’t say it was a relief, but I was due,” Pollack says now. “I’d had a string of successful pictures, and I knew sooner or later that I would make a picture and it would backfire. And Havana turned out to be the one. I still like the film very much.” Pollack’s production company, Mirage, has had a piece of several offbeat films in the past decade (Bright Lights, Big City; The Fabulous Baker Boys; White Palace), as well as the successful adaptation of Presumed Innocent, with a certain Mr. Ford. After every project, Pollack says he’d like to direct something smaller-scale himself, but he now wonders if he ever will. “People don’t have a lot of sympathy,” he observes, “for a guy who’s made as much money as I have going to the unions and saying, ‘We’re all going to take no money, even if I take no money myself.”

WHILE THE MOVIE was in production in New York, videotapes of the original Sabrina were impossible to find around town, and it was even difficult to rent a copy. If Pollack were an optimist, he might see that as a good sign: new generations of moviegoers becom­ing aware of his project. After all, hardly any- one under 50 saw the original in a movie the­ater. But, of course, Pollack isn’t an optimist.

“It’s bad in the sense that if so many people adore that movie, anything that isn’t that movie has got a strong chance of disappoint­ing them,” he says. “I’d feel very good about this if it wasn’t a remake. But I have no way of controlling expectations of people who are in love with the old version of it.” Rudin is now more confident: “It has ele­ments of the original movie in place for the people who revere the original one, but its ambition is so different than the first movie, that no matter how much of a grudge you go in with, you won’t be able to hold on to it. You are almost forced to evaluate it fresh.” Or at least he hopes so. For Christmas last year, Rudin’s assistants bought him a one- sheet poster from the original Sabrina, and got Billy Wilder to sign it. But as Rudin points out, “It says, ‘To Scott, good luck, Billy Wilder.’ I said to my assistant, ‘What was his expression when he wrote this? Was it charitable or gloating?’ Is that, like, ‘Good luck, whoever you are,’ or”-he shifts into a withering, sarcastic tone-” ‘Good luck!’ I thought, This can be taken any number of ways.

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